Good Community Through Conflict

Community is difficult isn’t it? This week, I have had many hard conversations with various people. Maybe you have had a similar week. Despite our best intentions, somehow things we think get jumbled up inside. When they finally find their way outside of us, our words and actions can be misunderstood or at worst hurtful to those whom we are desperate to communicate. Maybe you have also had the experience coming from the other way. Maybe your friends, co-workers, and family have been trying to communicate with you but somehow they have hurt you.

The temptation is to give up on the process. When we can’t find a solution, we don’t want to make things worse, and we certainly don’t want to continue to set ourselves up to be hurt by others. It is in this temptation that we can choose to walk away from relationships. To give in to this temptation is to move of self-preservation. Yet, I have recently seen through the temptation to see an opportunity.

Simply put, the opportunity is to become like Jesus in loving others. The gospels tell us story after story of people who were trying to entrap Jesus or worse they were trying to kill him over what he said and did. Yet, somehow he continued to welcome their invitations to dinner parties specifically designed to label him a fraud and blasphemer. Even his best friends didn’t get Jesus. Yet Jesus still invited them to share a meal with him during his final days.

Jesus’ persevering, pursuant love has reawakened my imagination to a new way of doing community. Pray with me that we might be the type of community that doesn’t walk away from each other, but welcomes Christ’s example to pursue people even if it takes a while to be understood.

Alpha Basically

This week I attended the first Alpha Course meeting. Overall, it went very well. I had a good time meeting new people over dinner, but it was the conversation after the talk that really surprised me.

We all shared a bit about our lives and what we were hoping to learn through Alpha. Everyone at my table was willing to be vulnerable. They shared about their faith tradition and how it influenced their understanding of Jesus. I was surprised to find out how easy it was to talk about Jesus in this context. Some shared that they didn’t know much about Jesus in the first place, while others shared more painful experiences about their introduction to Jesus years ago through their church and family.

In talking with some of the young adults who attended the first meeting, it was easy to see that God is up to something with this ministry. Pray with us that God would use Alpha to draw people to himself.